becoming a Queen
My incredibly awesome neighbor bought me a book by another Austinite, Merrit Ingman called “Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health Out With the Diapers.” The book touched on a lot of my own thoughts and feelings about early parenthood. While I still don’t know if my roller coaster of emotions earlier this year was postpartum depression or “just” new parenthood (times two since we had twins) I could still relate in major ways to her expressions of emotions and feelings about those first few months. I think that the line between postpartum and “just” new parenthood is a very, very fine and slippery one. Like most things female, it goes in and out of form and changes - mercurial. And what exactly kept me from going “over the edge” but didn’t another, I’ll certainly never know (although I’m starting to have some suspicions but that’s probably a whole other post). I can’t help saying the word “just” with a lot of sarcasm because being a new mother is the most inexplicable experience until you go through it. Because nothing ever prepared me for this and I’m still struggling to understand just how deep and dark I went with it. There is nothing “just” about being a new mother, certainly not if you have a high needs child (colic) and/or twins. Lucky me, I had both.
Reading that book combined with some recent conversations with other moms leads me to be very open and honest about my experiences. Maybe it’ll help someone else. Maybe she’ll read this and not feel so alone, so crazy, so horrible. I don’t expect it’ll mean anything to anyone as an advance warning, but maybe in the midst she won’t hate herself quit as much because others have felt and thought that too.
I wasn’t prepared to be a mother.
I didn’t realize how sleep deprived I would be nor how sleep deprivation effects me. I didn’t realize how much babies cry or what it was like to take care of an infant with colic. I hadn’t been around infants since junior high and I pretty much had no memory of what that was like. So that’s the number one thing missing in our culture as women, constant exposure to infants and what it’s like to care for them. I imagine in the past or in less industrial cultures, women were/are better prepared simply be exposure. Another missing piece is the support of family and friends. My mother came and stayed with me for an entire month and I also had extensive visits from Brad’s mom. But honestly it wasn’t enough. I wished I had lived in the same city as a relative who was able to baby sit or come over and help for a few hours a day. I’m sure my experience was extreme because of having twins but I still know that this would be vital for any mother with an infant. Not just a “new” mom, but any mom with a new born baby. The worst part is that I have an incredible support system of family and friends who wanted to be there for me and would have helped if I had asked. But I didn’t ask.
And why was I too stuck on the idea of “doing it all myself”? Why was it such an issue of pride to prove that I could? In my darkest moments, the boys would both be crying and I was unable to know how to make them stop. I felt out of control, I felt a failure. I would be crying huge tears and looking up to heaven, “why did you do this to me? I can’t do this!! I’m not strong enough for this. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to do this.” And yet I wouldn’t ask for help. I wouldn’t pick up the phone and share what I was going through. I was afraid that there was something wrong with me and that others would think I was a failure. That I wasn’t worthy of being a mother. The dialog in my head included things like “you wanted this, you chose this, now you have to deal with it.” I worried that the anger that I felt towards my colicky baby meant that I wasn’t a good person.
Recently I’ve been talking to other moms of all ages and have discovered that my thoughts of throwing babies out the window or against the wall are not original. There is nothing new in the scary images that my mind created in those dark moments of what seemed like my ineptitude as two babies cried and cried. I’ve learned a lot in the past 6 months and those will probably be additional posts to come but right now I want to focus on the transition itself.
I’m big into archetypes and mythology, in fact Joseph Campbell is on my top three list of people I’d like to bring back from the dead to have over for dinner and conversation and I’m actively studying Jung. This fits in well with my love of ceremony and strong interest in life transition. It’s recently been on my mind to talk about the transition into motherhood for me and knowing where my “hook” is should help some readers understand me better. I think that the transition into motherhood for many is like the moving from a princess to a queen. The princess is all about dressing up and looking pretty, she can’t get enough attention from men or her female friends, she lives her life without very many cares and she is filled with delightful energy. The queen lives for her country, or in the case of a mother, her family. Her decisions must factor in a dozen others and she’s very limited about expressing her own needs. She must care for herself but it’s in order to care for others, no longer just for herself because it feels good or looks good. The queen faces hard choices, hard facts, and often sets aside her own desires because she sees a bigger picture, she looks forward into the future and makes decisions that impact so many others.
As we new moms live through this experience of having babies, we start to change. We are no longer the women who go out for happy hours in high heels, no longer the women who live in romance and fantasy, no longer princesses. We grow into queens, women who make sacrifices for the good of their family and children, women who decide that a good dinner is worth more then sexy lingerie, women who marry a real man: one who treats her with respect, as an equal and will get up in the middle of the night to hold the crying baby. We know how to wear jeans and a tshirt with the right lipstick to look stunning in minutes flat. We know how to make eye contact with strangers in Target and express a million empathies with other moms. I’m definitely going to add “coronation ceremony” to my list in the future.
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absolutely beautiful and breathtaking, dawn. i love this symbol of what we’ve become. although today, i have to admit, i feel more like the court jester than the queen. can’t wait to see you and then little men next week.